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WILKES-BARRE — With string secured to a pin stuck in a map, Sean Chandler stretched it to determine the coverage area for outside ambulances coming into the city as backup in a mutual aid response plan.
Chandler, the former chief paramedic with the Wilkes-Barre Fire Department, recalled creating the plan and bristled at the changes in the works by Mayor Tony George.
“It’s a complex system that’s working fantastically. All of us are dying to find out how you justify this,” Chandler said Friday.
A day earlier, the mayor confirmed he was naming Trans-Med Ambulance Inc. as the top backup, covering the entire city when Wilkes-Barre’s two ambulances are unavailable to respond to calls. The priority status as of April 15 will put the other participants further down the list for the plan put into practice in October 2011.
Chandler said that “from the get-go,” he was part of the team tasked with devising the response system between the city, Trans-Med, Kingston Fire Department, Hanover Township Community Ambulance Association and Plains Township Ambulance. “In fact, I made all the boundaries.”
But Chandler echoed concerns voiced by other participants about the reliability of Trans-Med in the existing plan and how that would play out with an expanded coverage area.
A call to Phillip Hamilton, director of operations at Trans-Med’s administrative office in Luzerne, was not returned Friday.
George has said he thinks it’s easier to have one backup.
That was the case prior to the creation of the mutual aid response system that assigned coverage geographically to the participants, explained Chandler, a staff paramedic with the city from 1976 until his retirement in 2014. Trans-Med was the main back up before the plan, Chandler said.
Back then, the company said it had more than 20 advanced life support units to respond throughout the city, Chandler said.
“But being a for-profit company with other monetary commitments, the reality is that there were many instances where they spread themselves so thin and, as a result, extended on-scene times were all too frequent,” Chandler said.
As a result, the city’s firefighters, also trained as emergency medical technicians and paramedics, would be dispatched to the call to render aid until Trans-Med arrived, Chandler said.
The company is still relying on its size to acquire service, Chandler said.
As it stands, Trans-Med is assigned to 62 percent of the city, operating from bases in Wilkes-Barre Township and on North Main Street, Wilkes-Barre, Chandler said. The assigned area grows to 85 percent of the city when other participants in the mutual aid plan are tied up, he said.
Prior to the plan’s implementation, Trans-Med put pressure on then-Mayor Tom Leighton to keep the status quo, Chandler said.
“I am left wondering if the for-profit Trans-Med owners again put a full-court press on the administration to revert to an old system with potential on-scene delays during life-threatening emergencies,” he said.
Chandler said he is concerned that for-profit enterprises will compete to take over the city’s emergency medical services system.
“These companies are notorious for making profits their top priorities as well as employing a paramedic staff with huge turnovers where only a pulse and a patch are required to care for our citizens,” he said.
Chandler made a plea to keep the plan in place.
“Mayor George, I implore you to reconsider the consequences of this decision and not institute this change on April 15th,” he said.